Carepool: from a personal challenge to an innovative healthcare app
Arranging healthcare may sound easy, but for PGB (personal care budget) holders, it is often a time-consuming and frustrating puzzle. Finding the right help, planning appointments and doing the administration can take weeks. This is the everyday reality for Julie de Lange, co-founder of Carepool. “In theory, as a PGB holder, you are in control. In practice, your control often gets lost in all the bother and paperwork.” This experience led Carepool to build an app that seeks the right care and makes planning and administration smarter and easier.
How do you really give people control over their healthcare?
A personal care budget is meant to give people more freedom and control. But in practice, arranging care often takes so much time and energy that that control comes under pressure. Someone needing to go away for a day for their work, has an appointment, or needs extra support, often has to look for options, make phone calls, plan, and do the administration themselves.
Julie recognizes this situation personally. “If I need to be away for my work for a day, it can sometimes take weeks to arrange the right care.” This dependency not only limits freedom in practice, but it touches something bigger – the opportunity to be a fully active member of society. This is where Carepool wants to make a change. The app is intended to help PGB holders find appropriate care more quickly, plan care that is clear to see, and reduce the administrative burden.
“In theory, as a PGB holder, you are in control. In practice, your control often gets lost in all the bother and paperwork.”
An idea that grew from personal experience
Carepool did not come about at a desk, but from a personal challenge. In 2024, Julie, Heike Faber and Maarten Holl decided to build a solution that better met the everyday reality of PGB holders.
The goal is clear: less organization work, more dignity, and more space to join in. Not by making care more complicated, but by making it easier to organize.
This is why Carepool targeted an area in healthcare where innovation is often lacking: the social domain. While new medical technologies are often developed, digital solutions for support, engagement, and self-help lag behind. This is where Carepool sees space for improvement.
Organizing care more smartly
Carepool’s app goes further than just administration. The platform helps organize care and support more smartly. Complex care remains with the healthcare professionals, but lighter support can be picked up by people like students or neighbors.
This both gives greater flexibility to PGB holders and better directs healthcare professionals to the areas where their expertise is needed the most. Not only is the solution thus relevant to individual users, but also to wider societal issues such as personnel shortages in healthcare.
The app also relieves users of some of the planning and administration work. Carepool is thus striving to reduce the time spent every day on arranging things and make it easier to arrange the right care on time.
From a need to a product
To avoid Carepool building a solution that may work technically, but does not reflect the need in practice, the team started by doing detailed market research. Through InnovationQuarter’s Market Readiness Program, Carepool interviewed more than 100 PGB holders. Their experiences, needs and bottlenecks are now the foundation for the further development of the platform.
This approach fits the basic premise of good healthcare innovation: start with the user and keep testing in practice. This is because of major differences in the social domain. Every situation is personal, every healthcare need is different, and every solution needs to fit in the daily life of the user.
Do you recognize this challenge?
Carepool shows how you can move from a clear target group need to market validation. Read more on: I want to validate my market.
First steps to the market
Along with the Basalt rehabilitation center and the Voorall stakeholder association, Carepool is now running a pilot in the Haaglanden region. The planning and administration functions are being tested in the pilot. The pilot is in part made possible by the ZorgTech innovation program in which Carepool works with partners to further strengthen the solution.
Carepool also received an investment of € 300,000 from InnovationQuarter Capital from the resources that the Municipality of The Hague made available. This allows the company to further develop the platform and prepare for a wide market launch.
Hans Dreijklufft, Senior Investment Manager at InnovationQuarter Capital, sees Carepool as an important example. “Carepool is the example for innovation in the social domain. It is target-group driven with a clear vision and will have a major societal impact. We are proud that we can use this investment to help speed up going to market.”
What is now possible
Carepool has big ambitions. The company wants to offer a complete solution within two years that will support PGB holders in finding, planning and administrating the right care. This will also reduce time, stress and energy in arranging care.
For Julie and her co-founders, in the end it’s about more than just efficiency. Through Carepool they want to help create a society in which people who need care experience more freedom, are less dependent on complicated procedures, and can fully be part of society.
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